Practical Information - Generative Linguistics in the Old World

THE GRAMMAR OF THE ESSENTIAL INDEXICALTxuss Martín & Wolfram Hinzen, Department of Philosophy, Durham University, UKPronouns are said to uniquely exhibit ‘essentially indexical’ forms of referential use (KAPLAN1989, PERRY 1993, LEWIS 1983): for example, ‘I’ does not mean ‘the speaker’ or ‘Bob’, even if Iutter ‘I’ and am Bob. Commonly, the phenomenon is modeled formal-semantically through acharacter-content distinction and evaluation relative to both worlds and contexts. Here we askwhy the phenomenon exists in the first place, and argue that inspection of the non-linguistic contextdoes not in fact bring out what makes 1 st person reference to an individual different from 3 rdperson reference to it. Pronoun use in mental illness (e.g. WATSON et al., 2012) also suggests thata speaker can know the speaker/agent of the context without knowing whether it is ‘I’. We arguethat essential indexicality involves the Person system essentially and is uniquely grammaticalrather than lexical or semantic. Indeed, qua lexical items, pronouns can lack such uses.LONGOBARDI 2005 proposes the ‘Topological Mapping Hypothesis’, according to whichthe forms of nominal reference are not regulated lexically or semantically but by the ‘topology’of the nominal phase (object-reference iff N-to-D movement or expletive-associate CHAINS).SHEEHAN & HINZEN 2011, interpreting the phase as the smallest unit of referential-deictic significancein grammar (ARSENIJEVIĆ & HINZEN 2012), capture the relevant topological principle as‘movement to the edge’, extending it further to the clausal phase (fact/truth reference iff T-to-Cmovement, based on evidence from V2, root phenomena, and expletive-associate CHAINS). Irrespectiveof lexical category, then, the phase exhibits a phase interior providing descriptive content,and a phase edge, which needs to be strongly filled for referential uses:(1) a. (saw) [ EDGE *(the) [ INTERIOR mayor of Paris]]b. (resents) [ EDGE *(that) [ INTERIOR the mayor of Paris is dead]]Interpretations of this template range from purely predicative (maximally intensional) to quantificational(scope-bearing), to 3 rd person object-referential. Here we extend the relevant mappingprinciples further, to deictic to personal forms of reference, as follows:(2) TOPOLOGICAL MAPPING PRINCIPLES:a. Predicative → phase interior only → [ EDGE ∅ [ INT man ]]b. Quantificational → edge + interior → [ EDGE a [ INT man ]]c. Referential (3P) → edge + → [ EDGE John [ INT ]]d. Deictic reference → edge + (interior) → [ EDGE this / ☞ [ INT (man)]]e. Personal (1st/2nd) → phase edge only → [ EDGE I [ INT ∅ ]]We demonstrate (2e) through a systematic morpho-syntactic decomposition of Romance objectclitics, which exhibit a stepwise increase in grammatical complexity with each layer in the hierarchyof referentiality above. MARTIN 2012 argues for the following structure:(3) DP ⇒ dativewo(deictic)4 DxP ⇒ strong accusativeD wo (referential)DX D ⇒ weak accusativewo(quantificational)D NP ⇒ partitivea. CATALAN: [l(s)] [i] L(S) 4 (predicative)b. PADUAN: D [ge] Dc. SARDINIAN: D [bi] [li(s)]